Alain Bignon

An integrated design flow for the joint generation of control and interfaces from a business model

The design of large systems suffers from communication problems inside design team and inconsistencies in design documentation. We have identified two concurrent but complementary approaches for design. The first is a bottom-up approach where the design is made by aggregation of standard components. The second is a top-down approach where the design is made by successive refining of a model. This paper offers an integrated design flow for the joint generation of controls and users interfaces for reconfigurable sociotechnical systems. In accordance with our industrial feedback our approach is based on a business model called the synoptic, and on a library of standard elements. We describe the tool Anaxagore, that implements this approach and with which one can generate, in few minutes, a command and an interface for two simple input models. The results of the generation are consistent with the specifications.

Joint generation of controls and interfaces for sociotechnical and reconfigurable systems

The purpose of this paper is the implementation of control loop for extended reconfigurable systems. In the context of “first time right” approach, its necessary to propose design method which takes into account reconfigurable feature of the system as well as its sociotechnical aspect. After a state of the art of industrial uses we define a design approach based on tools from model driven engineering. This method considers a job oriented model for input and allows the simultaneous implementation of the control code and of the man machine interfaces.

Designing Functional Specifications for Complex Systems

For designing complex and sociotechnical System that strongly interact with humans e.g., a ship is a large sociotechnical system. systems, designers are in charge of the functional specification because they have an operational expert knowledge. However, these experts do not usually master the programming knowledge of those who design supervision systems. Complex and sociotechnical systems include supervision systems which comprise monitoring interfaces and associated control codes. In this paper we propose an approach that facilitates functional specification of supervision systems. This approach aims at exploiting Example Based Programming EBP to propose a specification tool, which contains a generalization module and an interface generation module. Our tool allows experts who are acting as non-professional software developers to describe high level system functional services from elementary services. These functional services contain elementary interactions and configuration data. Thus, the expert, involved in coding, avoids a lot of errors related to the interpretation of the functional specifications. Our aim is to capture expert knowledge on the system being designed in order to have verified and validated functional specifications, without having to train experts in formal methods.

Formal Verification of Software-Intensive Systems Architectures Described with Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams

Socio-technical systems are increasingly becoming software-intensive. The challenge now is to design the architecture of such software-intensive systems for guaranteeing not only its correctness, but also the correctness of its implementation. In social-technical systems, the architecture (including software and physical elements) is described in terms of Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID). The design of these P&ID is still considered an art for which no rigorous design support exists. In order to detect and eliminate architectural design flaws, this paper proposes a formal-based automated approach for the verification of the essential architecture “total correctness” properties, i.e. compatibility, completeness, consistency, and correctness. This approach is based on the definition of an architectural style for P&ID design in Alloy. We use MDE to automatically generate Alloy models from a P&ID and check their compatibility with the style and its completeness, consistency, and correctness properties. Our approach is presented through an industrial case study: the system of storage and production of freshwater for a ship.

Anaxagore, an example of model-driven engineering for industrial supervision

For several years, MDE (Model Driven Engineering) has been increasing in Human Computer Interaction domain. It is particularly suitable for designing supervision software for sociotechnical and reconfigurable systems. In this article, we describe Anaxagore, an IDM based tool, which allows complete generation of interactive supervision software from business oriented synoptic descriptions.

A multi-level requirements modeling for sociotechnical system simulation-based checking

To improve the design of reconfigurable sociotechnical systems, it is necessary to ensure that the control/ monitoring system meets the end-user needs and requirements, as early as possible in the project. Simulation techniques help conduct functional/behavioral checks from early design stages. However, this involves modeling the requirements in context, according to the sociotechnical and reconfigurable features of the system. Therefore, we propose a multi-level requirements modeling and discuss its use, in the case of the design of a ship auxiliary fluid management system.